Nice.

I have actually been thinking that it would be nice to get this kind of feature to the core in 1.9. Do you think it could be possible with relatively little work? Or would it require too much tinkering with existing core features (e.g. the css)?

It's relatively little work to get the menu items into the dropdown, just look at the logic on the hook, should be safe to incorporate into core.

The css definitely did give me some trouble, simply because it seems almost everything in the default theme has overflow:hidden so anywhere you put a dropdown it gets hidden.  If that can be worked around (I'm sure there are people with better css skills than I) I don't see any reason this would be difficult to bring in.

Hi Matt, with this installed, you click +options and the dropdown menu gets covered up by images from photo albums, like its under it and not on top for some reason, the box is being hidden once you click on it (on my site anyway) so it won't allow you to adjust your options because its being blocked by a photo/thumbnail.

Also Note: due to the core themes insane over-usage of overflow:hidden the dropdown keeps getting hidden inside container elements.  This presents mostly in lists.  Therefore the css contained forces .elgg-body to have visible overflow when in lists, which helps this work.  It may cause issues with your theme, you'll have to figure that out yourself.

Lol, missed the notes. I see, it was originally designed for another site, so how would I make it work then with the default elgg theme? No big deal, I just liked the idea and wanted to use this.

seeing some unexplained behaviour for this here.. 
on my test site the menu causes no issues.
on my 'production' site the cpu maxes out in chromium when i view a page that has this plugin activated.
i thought the cause must be elsewhere since there are no console errors and i thought that the code for this plugin would be incapable of causing such an error.
however, when i disable this plugin, the cpu maxing stops..
this is with multiple different versions and flavours of chromium - tested using the built in task manager.

any thoughts as to what might be the cause? 

Yeah it's already been fixed in github - https://github.com/beck24/entitymenu_dropdown/commit/8ccf80dfa8c99377039a400e70250547fe6d0506

aha, yes, thanks.
any idea what the id is for blog drafts in the admin settings page? so that 'draft' is not included in the dropdown menu?

i found the css tag to be '.elgg-menu-item-published-status'..

adding 'published-status' to the list on the admin page didn't stop that item being added to the dropdown though.

@ura - the name conversion to css class can morph certain characters like the underscore.  Try 'published_status'

aha, yes, that's the one.. thanks for the tip. :)